1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computers and, more particularly, to techniques for providing flexible access to the resources in one or more storage facilities.
2. Description of the Background Art
In storage area network (SAN) based data centers, storage access and connectivity are provisioned in advance. For example, in a SAN cluster each node is configured so that each node can access all the storage resources each node may ever need, even if a given node is not using all the storage capacity at any particular moment. Each storage device must also be provisioned to and individually configured for all the nodes in the SAN cluster. This process is error prone and makes adding new resources to the cluster difficult. Fast and flexible data migration from one server host to another currently requires significant planning and reconfiguration phase. In cases where there is a physical host bus adapter (HBA) failure on a host and that HBA needs to be replaced, the configuration for that particular host has to be confirmed and/or redone to make sure that the connectivity between the host and the storage resources still exist. Where configuration changes are common and complex, significant resources are required to perform host failover recovery and/or data migration. There is a need, therefore, to address the above-mentioned problems.